Switching…

I told you, in the prerequisites, that you need an ISP that doesn’t block port 25 to be able to run your own mailserver. All mail connectivity uses port 25 for all it’s SMTP traffic. There are workarounds to solve this problem but they usually needed a friend or relative that has a running mail server who would receive your mail and forward it to you on a different port-number. Problem is that there aren’t many people running a mail server and are technical enough to help you out with this. But there is help…. (more…)

I was stuck with a problem I encountered a few weeks ago when I got back from my holiday. I was trying to post my holiday snapshots on my webserver to show to my friends, when I noticed that the big pictures didn’t want to load completely in the browser. They only downloaded for about 1/3 in the browser and I had to refresh the page several times to get the full photo. I’ve been banging my head on this for some time until David W. pointed me to a bug in Apache 2.0.54 that caused the error. He also explained how I could upgrade to 2.0.55 and keep all the things I had configured with the package from Server Logistics in place. If you have the Apache package running from them you might as well follow these instructions as well. (more…)

It has been a very busy week and not just for me. Wietse Venema (author of Postfix) released a version 2.2.9 of the Postfix mail-server and I also got an email from Sam Varshavchik on the Courier-announce mailing list that there is an updated version of the Courier IMAP server. Which meant that I had to download, compile, install and test all these new versions again on my test server before I could update my own server and tell you it was safe to upgrade. (more…)

Well, that was quick… exactly one month ago I upgraded my server with the latest patches and I’ve done it again, but with a newer patch. I just updated and tested my server and it passed the tests with flying colours. I anticipated no issues from reading the knowledgebase article on what was solved and changed.

So this means that you can upgrade your Mac mini safely without any problem if you used my instructions for the installation of the mail and web server. I can’t vouch for any other software you might be using.

Sorry for not posting that often as I would like to, but there are other things in my life that sometimes take precedence. I wanted to have my description for the spamassassin configuration ready but it’s not going to happen today ! But wanted to tell you found another blog about someone who is using his mini for more than just a cheap desktop mac.

A guy named Ken Collins has used 3 mac mini’s and 2 external hard-drives to setup his own NOC (network operations centre). He is talking about some of the services I wanted to include as well like DNS, external disks and automated back-up. I will follow his blog from now on to see if there is anything interesting I can learn. I hope that besides talking about his efforts he will write about how he did it in more detail so that we can learn more from his efforts.

The fun thing is I just ordered the same two external hard-disk enclosures from
NewerTechnology to be used for my own server. I want to use them to create a raid 1 configuration to be used for the server as the boot-able drive with extra partitions for backup purposes. Will let you know when they arrive and how they perform.

As a former user of squirrelmail on my Sun box I loved the use of a webmail client to access my mail all over the world on any computer connected to the internet equipped with a graphical browser. When confronted with the Roundcube webmail project I had to try it out and installing it on my mac mini server was the natural thing to do. I subscribed to the announcement mailinglist to keep track of updates as the official release version was and still is 0.1. (more…)

Today is my birthday, a day you do not intend to spend behind a computer screen, but I couldn’t resist to tell you about the success I had yesterday evening. I’ve got spamassassin working on my mail-server. The install is still very rough and not something I’m keeping as is. But it works ! I still need to train the filter a bit more and have been feeding my personal mail archive through it as well as some archives from the Spam Archive. (more…)